Jesse Bongiovi Teams With Rocker Dad Jon Bon Jovi on Rosé

Jesse Bongiovi sits with a bottle of Hampton Water, a wine he's launched with his father, Jon Bon Jovi.
Illustration:
Courtesy of KLG Public Relations

By

Beckie Strum

July 20, 2018 4:20 p.m. ET

Two years ago, Jon Bon Jovi stepped outside of his Hamptons beach home around 2 a.m. and offered his eldest son rosé, playfully calling it “pink juice.”

“Rosé is pretty much a fixture up there, the running joke being rosé is the water of the Hamptons,” Jesse Bongiovi recalls. “I looked at him and said, ‘No, dad, you’re sitting in East Hampton. You’re not drinking ‘pink juice,’ you’re drinking Hampton Water.”

Bon Jovi lit up at once. A rosé branded after the Hamptons’ seductive, sunkissed lifestyle—it was a great idea, he said.

Bongiovi, a recent graduate from the University of Notre Dame, took the late-night exchange and ran with it. He partnered with his rock star dad and a college buddy to launch a rosé wine he called Hampton Water, a project well outside the music industry that has put the 23-year-old on a path that is distinctly his own.

“I only sing in the shower,” Bongiovi said recently to a crowd of 20-somethings gathered for a financial literacy conference at the Four Seasons in downtown Manhattan.

The conference hosted by UBS, called the Young Successors Program, targets people like Bongiovi, the children of ultra high-net-worth—powerful, sometimes famous—individuals, who must learn to navigate the economic responsibilities that come with wealth. Presenters this year included 33-year-old F1 race car driver Nico Rosberg, who is also pivoting into entrepreneurship.

The series of workshops aims to give young people the tools to engage their families in conversations about transferring and preserving wealth, says Judy Spalthoff, head of philanthropy and family advisory at UBS Wealth Management USA and one of the creators of the conference.

Jesse Bongiovi speaks at the UBS Young Successors Program in June.
Illustration:
Courtesy of UBS

“Many wealthy families avoid talking about the business of the family,” Spalthoff says. “One way to start breaking the silence is by discussing the values and goals of each family member to address broader family mission and vision.”

Bongiovi was himself an attendee of UBS’s three-day program only a year ago, but now elucidates on what it’s like to successfully go into business with a parent, including the challenges of getting his way and the benefit of being able to leverage his dad’s celebrity in business meetings.

He recalls spending the first few months after that night in East Hampton sampling every rosé he could get his hands on and plotting out the brand identity, including a label that features an attractive swimmer diving into the bottle. The Bongiovis sought out top winemaker Gérard Bertrand to craft the wine, a blend of grenache, cinsault, and mourvèdre grapes grown in the Languedoc region in the south of France.

The result is a fresh, light-colored pink wine with notes of strawberry and melon that retails for between $20 to $25.

In the spring, experts at Wine Spectator magazine gave Hampton Water 90 points out of 100 in a blind taste test, making it one of the top rosés in the market, Bongiovi says.

The business relied a great deal on Bon Jovi’s connections initially, but the rating has earned the wine a seat at the table within the restaurant industry without his celebrity, Bongiovi says, calling the professional accolades a game changer.

“I could then take that and walk into a restaurant downtown… and say look, I have this wine, we have a 90 point rating. This isn’t just a pretty bottle with a pretty label, this isn’t just a gimmick with a name. This is a legit product, this is a legit company, and you should take us seriously because very serious people in the industry are taking us seriously,” Bongiovi says.

It’s a fruitful time for Bongiovi and his father to get into the French wine businesses. Young adults’ first wine-drinking experiences, so-called “gateway wines,” have shifted from domestic to primarily foreign, specifically French rosé and pinot grigio, according to the most recent wine industry report from Silicon Valley Bank.

Bongiovi and his business partner, college roommate Ali Thomas, plan to ride the French rosé wave into uncharted territory by expanding distribution of Hampton Water to cities in Texas, Missouri, Florida, and Nevada, where rosé consumption is limited, Bongiovi says.

“The expansion to the middle of the country is where we have the greatest opportunity,” Bongiovi says. “We want to be the ones to bring it to places like St. Louis, because I think, given the opportunity, why wouldn’t they want rosé?”

Standing at five foot, nine inches and 180 pounds, Bongiovi got a lesson in persistence as one of the smallest players on Notre Dame’s football team.

“To do that for four years and basically get my butt kicked every single day,” he says, “you gotta show up with a lot of determination and I like to think a pretty good amount of grit.”

When it comes to the business, has he won going head-to-head against his superstar dad? One young attendee at Bongiovi’s talk wants to know.

For the most part, no, he responds with a smile. But there was one time when the son fought successfully over branding. Bon Jovi wanted promotional tees to spell out “Hampton Water Wine,” rather than simply “Hampton Water.”

After all, “Bon Jovi doesn’t say ‘Rock Band’ at the end,” Bongiovi says to laughter. “You don’t need to bash people over the head with it, they will learn.”

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